previous next
[6] As for the troops, their supply of grain gave out, and it was not possible to buy any except in the Lydian1 market attached to the barbarian army of Cyrus,2 at the price of four sigli for a capith of wheat flour or barley meal. The siglus is worth seven and one-half Attic obols, and the capith had the capacity of two Attic choenices.3 The soldiers therefore managed to subsist by eating meat.4

1 The Lydians were notorious as hucksters.

2 See Xen. Anab. 1.2.18 and the note thereon, and Xen. Anab. 1.3.14.

3 The obol = about 1 1/2d. or 3 cents. The choenix = about 1 quart. The prices stated were, roughly, about fifty times normal prices at Athens.

4 The Greeks of Xenophon's time ate comparatively little meat under any circumstances, but in the Arabian desert a diet of meat constituted a real hardship.

Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 3. Carleton L. Brownson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1922.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1904)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Athens (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (14 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: